Ancient Alien

Art. Gilled bodies. Gray literature. Caricatures of a girl, the smell of wet paint, and the oily slick of long, black hair. These were the things my husband coveted. Dreamed about, talked about and masturbated over. The first night I witnessed his foreign consummation had happened purely on accident - happenstance. It was a Tuesday. The thermostat was set to 73 degrees. I was on my way up to the attic, a half-rolled joint tucked neatly in between my fingers.

I liked to smoke in the attic on weeknights. It quieted my sobering insomnia, and it made me feel, admittedly, a little cool. Like I was sneaking in smoke breaks again behind the barn at my work-college, and not a forty-three year old woman who worked two shifts a week at 7-11. Smoking pot cured my boredom and, like I said, it cured my insomnia. My husband and I both suffered from it. Mine was spurned from reasons existential, and his stemmed from a chemical imbalance. I know this because my husband sees things that other people don't. I say this because I question my reality in a way that is conventionally acceptable.

My husband Ben's diagnosis. Psychosis. A severe mental disorder in which thought and emotions are so impaired that contact is lost with external reality. My response to his disorder was sympathetic but naive, due to my grief and denial. "What is reality, anyway?" I laughed nervously, as I gripped the scratched edges of my plastic seat in the psychiatrist's office. Dr. Kwan looked down at his papers, and then looked up and a little past me. Dead serious. "This disorder has a poor prognosis," he said. Tight-lipped. Dry mouthed. Professionally empathetic. "We can start him on Abilify. It's an anti-psychotic, and it may help."

"I'm sorry," he said, as he wrote Ben a prescription, and I fought back tears.

But Ben doesn't take his prescription. He says that he does but I know that he doesn't because he's an idiot who leaves his unopened pills in the desk drawers of his study. And in the medicine cabinet. And in the glove compartment of our car. And he tells me that he doesn't see it anymore. It."You worry too much. I love you," he protests.

And I know that's not true because I see it. I see it. I see it, I see it, I see it and I see her, crawling over him with her long black hair and deep black eyes and perfect breasts. I watch them for hours from the doorway of the attic, horrified and mesmerized, like I'm watching a documentary about murder-suicide. And by the time I come down from my high, she's gone and he's asleep. Sprawled out on the floor, his glasses folded perfectly besides him. The next morning, another painting done, another article printed. About life on other planets and living-dead beings and the bacteria discovered on Mars. And the only questions that ring in my mind in the afterglow of my high are these. From whose womb was she birthed? From where does she come from? Is it his workplace, or another star?